New battles with the search engines today as Facebook steps forward as a contender.  With Twitter heralded as the new real-time search, Microsoft's Bing stealing market share from Google - who in turn are making super-fast Google Caffeine, and now Facebook is leaping forward to compete with both.  It's a busy world.

Yesterday evening everyone got very excited about Facebook buying Friendfeed.  This means Facebook get the ex-Google team - a team constantly praised with big words such as 'innovative' and 'creative'.  The Friendfeed team is responsible for Facebook developments, albeit not purposefully: they created real-time homepages and comment functions for Friendfeed, and shortly after this Facebook leapt on the bandwagon.  So now, rather than simply copying Friendfeed it can all come from in-house work.

This clever moves follows the announcement in July in which Facebook boasted of a new search facility they were planning.  Similarly to google, the search rivals Twitter more directly than ever, displaying real-time news from the last 30 days including status updates, photos, links, videos, and notes from yours and friends profiles, and pages from fan pages you may have joined.

This is different to Twitter since Twitter brings results from everyone around the world.  This leaves Google struggling to join in since the search engine takes time to log sites in popularity, and then not in recent popularity as Twitter and now Facebook do.  Which will triumph?  Well, I found out about this post-work news flash via Twitter...

Google it seems, is hard at work: